AWS-hosted tech providers urge Middle East customers to fail over now
Snowflake, Red Hat, and others warn customers not to wait around for the cloud to recover
After aerial strikes damaged AWS datacenters in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Snowflake, Red Hat, and IoT platform EMQX have told customers to open their disaster recovery playbook and move to new bit barns.
“We recommend customers enact their disaster recovery plans and recover from remote backups into alternate AWS Regions, ideally in Europe,” Red Hat said in a status update.
Red Hat told customers that its products were degraded in the region, and AWS recommended they could retry operations where possible, although most of the underlying services are still offline. On Wednesday morning, Red Hat said future updates would come through AWS.
In its most recent update, AWS said that while some of its services are coming back online, it recommends customers restore to the US, Europe, or Asia Pacific. Future updates on the datacenters' recovery will come directly to affected customers through the AWS Personal Health Dashboard, the company said.
“We continue to strongly recommend that customers with workloads running in the Middle East take action now to migrate those workloads to alternate AWS Regions. Customers should enact their disaster recovery plans, recover from remote backups stored in other Regions, and update their applications to direct traffic away from the affected Regions.”
Snowflake said customers in the affected regions may be unable to access multiple core services, leaving users unable to sign in, execute queries, or manage data, and said it has no estimated time of restoration yet.
“An updated ETA is not yet available. We'll provide one as soon as possible. In the meantime, we recommend that affected customers using replication initiate their failover procedures,” the company stated via a status update early Wednesday morning.
The connected device platform EMQX, which ferries data from vehicle sensors to the manufacturer and customers, said its services in the region were interrupted by the outage as well. EMQX said it had a successful failover from the two availability zones that were hit to one that was still operational.
“At this stage, deployments in the UAE region are running in temporary single-AZ mode,” the company wrote. “High availability across multiple Availability Zones will be restored once AWS confirms recovery.”
AWS datacenters were damaged during the opening exchange of missile and drone attacks by Iran on neighboring countries following US and Israeli strikes. Iranian attacks have targeted multiple sites across the Middle East including shipping terminals, commercial areas of Dubai, and military bases of the US and its allies in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar.
Amazon said two of its facilities in the UAE were directly struck, while in Bahrain a nearby drone strike caused damage to infrastructure at its data center.
“These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage,” Amazon said. ®